The Crookston Park Board met on Monday afternoon and began their meeting reviewing the 2019 Capitol Improvement list. The new members were also introduced to the Capital Improvement process said Parks and Recreation director Scott Riopelle. “We just explained the process we’ll use,” said Riopelle. “2019 is pretty well set, but if they see stuff in 2022 they want to see in 2021 or 2020 we can make those changes if we have the funding available at that point in time. We wanted them to see the process so they can start thinking ahead because we will start in May and June budgeting for 2020. This is something they can make a decision on and see which direction we should go.”
The 2019 Capital Improvements include picnic tables and benches, the park development matching funds program, a pickup, resurfacing the Highland tennis courts, arena improvements and setting aside a reserve for batteries for the electronic Zamboni. The current list of improvements for 2019 includes picnic shelters, tables, benches, park development matching funds program, a mower, a groomer or utility vehicle, arena improvements, the reserve for electric Zamboni batteries, playground equipment, and trail improvement.
The City of Crookston will be taking over the Crookston Community Pool on July 1 and started having discussions with the Crookston School District about offering programming beginning in June. “We will be taking over the pool in July, July 1st,” said Riopelle. “That’s the end of the fiscal year for the school. We’re looking at some program needs where we can maybe start running some programs in June. We’ve had some good talks with the school about allowing us to do that. We will then take over the employees in July and see what we can add in programming. And we talked about how we could benefit some of these young workers pay wise.”
The City currently pays their seasonal employees in Parks and Recreation a higher wage than the pool staff makes and the City will raise the wages to the City rate upon acquiring the pool. Becky Kofoed also asked Cody Brekken if there was anything he needed to make additional programming happen. Brekken said that much of his duties currently focus on maintaining the facility such as chemical levels, cleaning locker rooms, bathrooms, and other facility related tasks.
According to Riopelle, the pool is not the only City facility asking about help with cleaning. “Those are all things that have to be ironed out at this point,” said Riopelle. “We had some discussions a week or two back about how we can better utilize his skills and expand opportunities at the pool like whether we can add employees that help with the running of the pool, cleaning, those types of things and let him spend more time programming. Those are all details that will still be worked out but that’s the way we would like to go and he would like to go.”
City Administrator Shannon Stassen said the council will be considering facility maintenance like cleaning during their strategy session at the end of the month. Kofoed also said if we can’t do programming because we don’t have the staff to clean bathrooms we have a problem.
The park board also discussed the sports courts at the Crookston Sports Center. Nathan Lubarski, who also serves on the Crookston Youth Basketball Association board, said that group was wondering about having the sports courts open in the evenings during the summer for basketball. They also were curious if that would require some volunteer hours. Riopelle said the City would look into offering extended hours either with staff or volunteers to have the sports court more available. “We would look at having some extended hours for the Sports Center,” said Riopelle. “Right now in the summer we’re pretty much closed at 5:00 p.m. daily for the better parts of June, July, and August where we don’t have personnel there for 16 hours a day, seven days per week. We would have to look at some options where we have the sports court open where we might utilize volunteers or paid staff and give people an opportunity to shoot some hoops or do whatever on those courts.”
The next park board meeting is scheduled for Monday, April 15 at 4:45 p.m.
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